Book Talk | Bench Asnfield | Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, March 4 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Bench Asnfield. They will discuss their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, with Johanna Fernandez and Tom Sugrue.

Bench Ansfield is a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University, and they hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton), was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 by the New York Times and one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year by Kirkus. Born in Flames examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of U.S. cities in the 1970s. Their peer-edited articles have also appeared in Antipode and in the collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke 2015), edited by Katherine McKittrick. Bench worked as a researcher on the PBS-aired documentary Decade of Fire (2019), and they curated a digital exhibition with the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They’ve also written for the New York Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and the Washington Post’s Made by History series, along with other popular publications. They are a longtime member of the veteran transformative justice organization Philly Stands Up, and their writing on that work can be found in Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan’s volume, Fumbling Towards Repair as well as the journal Tikkun. Their research has been supported by an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Jefferson Scholars National Fellowship, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. She is an Associate Professor of History at Baruch College, where she teaches 20th-century US history and the history of social movements. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. She directed and co-curated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of the year’s “Top 10, Best In Art”.

Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and the founding Director of Cities Collaborative at New York University.  He is the author of four books, including Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and editor of five others. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 450 public lectures throughout the United States and in Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan.